We are having a very good year, says Eros International

Fiscal 2016 has been a terrific year for Eros International and the going is getting better. In an interaction with Bloomberg TV India on the sidelines of the Ambit India Access Summit in New York, Prem Parameswaran, Group CFO & President of North America for Eros International, says their next big bet is ErosNow, the new initiative in the digital space.

While the global economic arena looks gloomy, what’s the scenario for the silver screen and Eros in particular?

We are having a terrific year in all our businesses. Our theatrical and distribution business — we do 65-70 films a year — are tracking very nicely.

We are having some big hits like

Tanu Weds Manu Returns , Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Dil Dhadakne Do . In December, we are coming with Bajirao Mastani , which is going to be tremendous as well. Our theatrical business is excellent.

Our syndication business, which is our TV syndication business post the theatrical release, has also been great.

And, between these two businesses we have been running 15 per cent top line growth with 30-35 per cent margin. Our third business which everyone is talking about now is the new digital OTT platform, ErosNow.

How is the investment pipeline looking for the current year as far as content is concerned?

We have a terrific theatrical slate this year and next year. We spent nearly $262 million in capex last year. We are projecting to spend $225 million (this year). But we are not in capex and content this year. And again given our theatrical success we are going to see tremendous margins on that. And as I mentioned some of our recent successes are going to continue, knock on wood. We have been anywhere from 30-40 per cent of the Indian box office and this year most probably we are going to exceed that. We are having a very good year.

ErosNow is something that is picking up. How is the content being consumed?

We are very excited about ErosNow. We have a movie library of 3,000 films, 1,50,000 songs and we literally have 26.5 million users already. We will do some original programming content with three TV series. We will also be doing some original movie production for it. We premiered Tanu Weds Manu Returns on it as a new window after post theatrical release but before TV syndication service. This is something new to India. We grew our register user base to 26.5 million this year from 19 million to quarter before that and 14 million to quarter before that.

Where are all these subscribers coming from?

Primarily the subscriber base is in India.